Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.9, introducing a massive number of engine improvements detailed in 70 pages of release notes. Hundreds of updates from Epic’s development team are included in the release, with 129 upgrades contributed by the Unreal Engine community at GitHub.
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Epic has greatly improved iOS and Android platform support, with additions such as efficient dynamic shadows, movable lights and decals for mobile projects. Most mobile upgrades apply to HTML5 development as well.
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Unreal Engine 4.9 also introduces VR motion controller support through a single unified interface, starting with HTC Vive SteamVR input, with others such as PlayStation Move and Oculus Rift soon to follow. The latest VR SDKs for HTC Vive and Gear VR are now integrated natively with UE4 as well.
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In addition, full scene particle collision, which enables particles to efficiently collide with entire scenes as opposed to what is only viewed on screen, is now supported. This can be used for various effects including accumulating snow and sparks colliding with surfaces. Now supported in 4.9 are even more leading-edge rendering features, including area shadows, ambient occlusion material masks, post process blending, hierarchical level of detail (HLOD), and numerous global distance field features. There’s even a new character control plugin for making smoother videos and live demos of architectural visualizations.
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Epic’s early implementation of DirectX 12 support is also available in 4.9 through a simple command line prompt. Many performance and quality of life features have shipped, from Blueprint upgrades to the new runtime asset cache, and even a plugin creation wizard. Many new collection and tagging options can be found in the Content Browser, which now supports advanced search syntax.
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The Persona animation system also gets its share of updates, with new non-linear animation blending support, bone-driven controllers, improved animation blending trees, and more. Finally, UE4 documentation has gone through a major overhaul, with filtering for skill level, engine version and category tags now published.
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For more information on Unreal Engine 4.9 visit the blog.
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